When Cypress HomeCare Solutions parted ways with Honor in 2024, it meant starting over again.

“I walked away from a lot of business, to the tune of almost $4 million, and had to start all over again,” Bob Roth, managing partner at Cypress, told Home Health Care News. “I had a few clients that I was caring for, and I had a little bit of Medicaid business.”

One year after essentially wiping the slate clean, Cypress has grown its workforce from 18 caregivers to 240, evolved its hiring processes and crafted its company culture all on its own.

Founded in 1994, Scottsdale, Arizona-based Cypress is a home-based care company that offers personal care, dementia programs and more.

Roth explained that Cypress and Honor had differing views on the best ways to approach care ops, which led the former to end the partnership after four years – one year before the agreement was set to expire.

“​​Home care is relational,” Roth said. “It’s relational with our caregivers. It’s relational with our clients and their families. It’s not a transaction.”

New hiring processes

For Cypress, part of rebuilding meant revamping its workforce processes. This was not an easy task, considering that the company was now operating in an entirely new environment, according to Roth.

“A lot has changed since COVID,” he said. “Caregivers weren’t coming to the office anymore, and it wasn’t just [Cypress]. I talked to a lot of home care companies. We had to go to where they were in order to find them, interview them and bring them into the proverbial recruitment funnel.”

In order to pull this off, Cypress joined forces with several new partners.

One of these partners was recruitment platform AvaHR, which allowed Cypress to post open positions on up to 18 job boards a day, and revise those postings through automation.

“In these job postings, you have to be dynamic,” Roth said. “If you’re static, you fall down to the bottom, so you have to continuously refresh that. We don’t have humans doing that any longer. We let the machines do that.”

Cypress also collaborated with HelloHire, an AI-powered recruiting platform, to implement digital interviewing. Applying this allowed the company to rework its approach to recruiting by adding a 10-minute virtual interview to the start of the process.

Roth explained that, before overhauling its recruitment process, Cypress operated with a four-phase interviewing process. The process began with a phone interview, followed by an in-person interview in phase two. Next, the candidate would complete a three to four-hour orientation. After this, the candidate would meet with the company’s scheduler. Lastly, the candidate was required to take a drug test. Upon completion of the drug test, the candidate was added to the schedule and can begin working shifts.

“In the new paradigm, we do the digital interview,” Roth said. “We gather all the credentials, then we do a second digital interview, and we’re doing a much deeper dive. We’re really learning a lot about their background. We’re learning about their experience. We’re learning about what their likes and dislikes are, what days they’re available, what hours they can work, what geographies they can go in. We’re learning a lot about them in all of those interviews, all the information is transcribed, summarized, and it’s imported over to AxisCare.”

Cypress’s third and fourth phases remain the same, but making the first two parts of the recruitment process virtual has allowed the company to hire faster, according to Roth. This is crucial when operating in a highly competitive home care market.

“Ninety percent of our workforce lives paycheck to paycheck, so if you can’t get them in the proverbial recruitment funnel as quickly as possible, you’re going to lose them,” Roth said. “We’re able to [reduce a process] that used to take maybe three weeks. We can bring in someone in three to four days.”

Evolving the company

As part of the company’s workforce development strategy, Cypress also partnered with Homecare Pro, an HR compliance platform, to handle credentialing and licensing.

Since the start of Cypress’ workforce development efforts, the company has gone from 18 caregivers to roughly 240 over the course of 16 months, according to Roth.

For Cypress, rebuilding its workforce does not end with just recruiting new caregivers. Now that the company has beefed up its staff, building culture is top of mind.

The company is already addressing this in a few different ways. Cypress holds virtual check-in meetings twice a week with its staff, typically lasting up to 45 minutes. This time is spent talking about cases.

Team bonding is also a priority for the company. Cypress recently began offering meetups centered on fun activities for the staff — painting, axe throwing, Topgolf and happy hours, to name a few. This is important given that the company has a remote workforce, Roth said.

“We try to do that once a month, just so that we can all feel like we’re connected,” Roth said. “It’s hard because you feel siloed. We’re in a new world, and I really think that we need to embrace where we’re at.”

Though Cypress ended its agreement with Honor, Roth said the partnership provided valuable lessons.

“I learned a lot from my Honor experience,” he said. “The people were incredibly brilliant. I really believe my intellectual capital is probably up times 10 because I learned so much from them, but here I was not attached to any of the baggage I had before, and I could pivot and evolve into this entity I have now.”